(This series started with Pattern matching and prediction, part 1)

For part 2, I wanted to start (and probably also end) with Cybula’s AURA (universal pattern matcher, white-paper dated 2004). AURA is said to be built around Correlation Matrix Memory (CMM). CMMs were developed (or picked up for development?) by Prof. Austin, the founder of Cybula, in 1986.

The white paper tells us that

The now ubiquitous neural network methods such as Kohonen Networks, Radial Basis Function networks and Kohnen networks all allow users develop good pattern matching systems for small problems, where they excel. However, when the problems grow to large datasets, and where very high performance is needed, they become limited. … The well known k-Nearest Neighbour methods (k-NN) is a relatively good pattern matching method that has been constantly shown to operate well on many problems, however, it suffers from slow operation on large data problems.

Read the rest of this entry »

The blog isn’t currently updated, as I’m quite busy with several abrupt opportunities, main of which is the Google Summer of Code 2007 (announcement here). I applied for the WordPress with “Improve the performance of WordPress” project. Currently I’m working on the detailed weekly 3-month-long plan of implementation for the project. I do feel that I should have learned about GSoC-2007 earlier than Friday, March 23rd . Well, it’s good at least that the deadline for applications was extended until the 27th of March, and I could at least register and submit the only application which I consider to be a good fit for my current activities and skills.

This year the competition doesn’t seem overly tough, with around 3000 students, over 6100 applications, and 800 stipends for successful applicants. However, among the 131 OpenSource projects, some will definitely enjoy slightly more attention and applications than others. I wonder how many applications there are for WordPress

Update: WordPress 2.5+ does not require adding rewrite rules to .htaccess, as it now redirects the browser to the correct (configured) URL itself. However, if you would like the redirection to be made by apache’s mod_rewrite rather than by PHP’s header() instruction (which I suspect to be slower than mod_rewrite), then you can still use the instructions below. (Another consideration to stick to mod_rewrite is the presence of other software installed into the root of the same domain as the WP blog; mod_rewrite solution works for all, while WP’s own redirect works only for WP.)

See important update at the end of this post!

In the early days of my acquaintance with internet, I considered it obligatory to add the “www.” part in front of every site (domain) name. As a matter of fact, without those three mysterious letters most of the websites “didn’t work”.

Now, nearly a decade later, it appears clear to me that the www part is redundant. But it was only today, that I finally switched my blog to the use of Class B no-www policy. Earlier it was Class A, the most common.
Read the rest of this entry »

HostICan has an affiliate program - they offer you 90$ for every confirmed purchase. “Confirmed purchase” usually means that some period of time must elapse before the purchase is considered as an affiliate purchase.

Variety of banners are available, e.g.:

SiteHeart’s ideology is a bit strange, in my opinion: they say “talk, deal, pay”, but are more of a usual payments system, than “social payments system”, as it appears to be positioned.

Rumours have it that SiteHeart is somehow endorsed/sponsored/supported/created by the Ukrainian PrivatBank… though official address is in San Jose, CA.

Now to the affiliate program: they promise 0.1% from any transactions, generated from your affiliate “pay-banner”. Frankly speaking, some factors (like the absence of the normal affiliate control panel, nothing said about referral tracking by cookies etc) make me think that the “Affiliate program” in the best scenario works only when paid directly from the affiliate link…

Well, here’s how the affiliate banner looks (it’s within an iframe; you may also follow this link):

And here’s the siteheart’s URL.

P.S. so far I didn’t manage to get to the _any_ statistics page… looks like it wasn’t the best affiliate program to start this category with

According to one of the definitions I provided earlier in the descriptive entry-level post on what is artificial intelligence, intelligence can be described as a special pattern-matching algorithm. Evidently, universal and complicated and recurring pattern matcher, but still just a pattern matcher

I decided to find out more about pattern matchers of nowadays… definitely not focusing too much on regular expressions, which are of no interest to me in the light of possible applications.
Read the rest of this entry »

PodTech had an interview with Jason Calacanis published on October 3, 2006.

You can download the video from the source page, or use my local copy.

As for the “starting a company” part, which goes closer to the end of the video, Jason recommends focusing on a single thing and excel in it. That is, if you are starting a company to host user blogs - then think on what you can do better than others in the field, instead of adding ontop of your blogs some additional not-that-really-related services.

Jason also foresees great future for the internet advertising, providing as an example iTunes-like shops providing TV shows for download, and - of course - embedding some ads. The same goes for user-generated content providers, which are viewed by the producers and sellers as good platforms to promote and sell their goods.

As I earlier said, computer games are evil. After nearly half a year of not playing any computer games, I spent a few hours on “trackmania nations” racing.

Probably the only reason of writing about trackmania is the system of “distributed gameplay” in this game. As I am not a gamer, I do not know if trackmania was the first to introduce the “distributed gaming and ranking system”, but the system itself is very appealing and even akin to the computational efforts like The GRID and seti/folding@home etc.
Read the rest of this entry »

Why I hate frameworks? by Benji Smith. Recommended to anybody involved in web-development and familiar with the concept of web-development frameworks. (For the serious stuff, see my post on Why Zope 3 is just great.)

Recently I learned about Zope, which is an “open source web application server”, primarily written in Python.

Then Django and Turbogears were seen as web-development frameworks akin to Zope. Search revealed an interesting anti-Zope rant at Zope vs Django. Reading until the end, and then following the comments, I came across the comment by Holger Froebe, which is a huge one (probably the longest comment I had ever seen), and represents a detailed explanation with examples of the reasons to use Zope 3. I found that comment to be a really good-written one, so if you are deciding on whether you should use Zope 3 or not, then read the comment here (scroll down or just search for “Holger Froebe”).

For convenience and in order to preserve this worhty piece of work from vanishing, below is the 99%-exact copy-paste of that comment.
Read the rest of this entry »

If you didn’t read the Ada programming book I earlier recommended, then here’s the excerpt on Ada type system.

Note: the excerpt is taken from this chapter, with copyrights belonging to respective authors.

Here is the Ada types hierarchy (click for larger image):

Read the rest of this entry »

I came across an interesting conferences list. It is for the year 2007, but it appears to be updated and refreshed (based on the availability of conferences-2006 and earlier lists, back to 2004).

The conference list is divided into several sub-lists:

• artificial intelligence
• bioinformatics
• data mining
• machine learning
• medical informatics
• web informatics

The list is regularly updated, as it appears from the “deadline:” note for each conference - they appear as soon as deadlines become known.

I would recommend to anyone who’s interested in the topics listed above to bookmark that page.

Thanks to Li Guoliang for the list!

Update 7: I’m now quite satisfied with page generation times. See other updates at the end of the post and comments to find out more.

Note: have a look at other hosting options.

I’m currently using GoDaddy shared hosting plan. I noticed that my blog, as it grows in popularity and visitors, displays a wide range of page-response times. The best I had seen so far was below 3 seconds of page generation time (note: _not_ page loading, but page generation). If it were the average, I would be happy. However, much more frequently observed times are in range of 20-30 seconds per page. Sometimes pages even timeout, as my uptime tracker service is reporting (For February, there were 100 minutes of unresponsive pages, for March - already over 10 hours!!!).

For example, today around 16:00 GMT the following statistics were reported by my blog:

22 queries.
33.416 seconds.

Evidently, this is unacceptably slow.
Read the rest of this entry »

Do you know what is parkour? If not - this videos collection will tell you

(But, in short, the philosophy is: “100% efficiency in urban movement”.)

All the videos (except for two) are embedded from the Parkour series at ExpertVillage. As a side note: ExpertVillage shows ads before the video from time to time.

To start with, you may want to know the short history of parkour. Here is a movie from one of the parkour-evangelists:

Read the rest of this entry »

About a month ago I found this good Ada Programming book at Wikipedia Books.

I already have some (minor) knowledge in Ada, and read some books/tutorials. I had only started reading the above-mentioned book, but from the very “Basics” I liked the narration and details provided (e.g., I do not recollect encountering the renaming of packages as a short-cut used instead of ‘use’ing packages).

If the book continues in at least the same style, depth and examples enrichment, then I can recommend this book for those who want to study/refresh the Ada Programming knowledge and skills.

It is from this book that I learned that GNAT “is the only Ada compiler that supports all of the optional annexes of the language standard”.

This is a collection of links related to the multiple-language content in Drupal CMS.

Drupal i18n report: http://www.developmentseed.org/blog/book/print/376
i18n module
i18n: Getting the whole thing to work : http://drupal.org/node/81094
Patch: Translations of menu titles and descriptions: http://drupal.org/node/70919
Translated links: http://drupal.org/node/67814
i18n: menu not expanding with URL-Alias: http://drupal.org/node/80820

There was an alternative module to i18n, but I cannot find it at the moment.

Just came across yet another geo-tracking visitors service. (For two more, see my previous posts - one on MapStats, and one on ClustrMaps.)
Read the rest of this entry »

9 hours ago WordPress team reported that the latest version of wordpress (which was 2.1.1), was modified by a third party to include code, which allows the execution of arbitrary PHP code on the remote blog hosting. Here’s the news. I created this post with the only aim to spread the word, so that everybody involved may upgrade faster, and stay on the secure path of using WordPress 2.1.2.

At the web-site for the annual Gliwice Scientific Meetings (left-top of the logo) there are 3 GIFs related to computer tomography. I found the last one good to save:
Read the rest of this entry »